Spiffy:

Iffy:

Details still vague; last two Digital Extremes titles left a bad taste in the collective mouths of gamers.

For many gamers, Canadian developer Digital Extremes' Dark Sector was the first glance at what a PS3 game could look like. When its trailer ran in early 2005, there was a great deal of mystery shrouding the system, and while the game's teaser only raised more questions, it was indisputable that it was a fine-looking presentation of the PS3's power. Since then, Dark Sector has quietly fallen into obscurity as the hype and fanfare surrounding next-gen surges. After nearly two years of silence, however, it's back and revamped. With Japanese publisher D3 taking the distribution rights, Digital Extremes' title has undergone quite a few changes, and is still a ways off from being complete. While we couldn't get hands-on with it, we got a chance to check out this title in action, nearly a year before it drops in stores.

While the original trailer evoked the sort of game setting that we've now come to refer to as "Bald Space Marine Game," the new Dark Sector is more like a sci-fi Resident Evil 4 meets Mad Max with a twist of post-Communist Eastern Europe. Strangely, it seems that the guys who helped make the Unreal experience probably wouldn't disagree. Heck, it might be what someone said during the pitch meeting.

Players will take on the role of Hayden Tanno, an antiheroic "cleaner" for the CIA who's been dropped into the former Soviet republic to eliminate traces of decades spent doing bioresearch. Apparently, this country has produced a plague that causes people to horribly mutate into homicidal monsters; they have started a civil war of sorts with uninfected soldiers. Hayden himself is infected, but for some strange reason, his genes have slowed the process of the disease, and it's up to him to find out the root of it, and the cure, before he becomes one of the fiends. The infection isn't all terrible, however, as it has granted him one completely sick bio-weapon, which is currently referred to as the glaive. We told you it's pretty early in the development process.

The glaive is a bladed disc that anyone with an elephantine memory will remember from the awful 1983 film Krull. Essentially, it's a discus, shuriken, and boomerang all in one. What's exceptionally cool about it is its "Swiss Army" nature. Every ability that Hayden has is unlocked from the get-go (and subsequently upgraded as the game goes on), and thusly, it's an all-purpose device that can be used for combat and other things. It's actually used quite a bit for puzzle-solving. Since most of the game's puzzles involve some sort of environmental interaction, and the glaive absorbs different elements of the environment, it can be used to get past certain obstacles. For example, during the early stages of the demo level, Hayden encounters a door blocked by a largely immovable wooden obstacle. Rather than hack away at it with the blade of the disc, he can hurtle the weapon at a flammable canister, or a flaming truck that might've been blown up during a battle. As a result, the glaive will ignite, and he can use the flames to burn down the wooden obstacle. It's one of many ways that we'll see it used for puzzle-solving.